Ideas and thoughts on programming and software development

TinyBmp: A small program for generating images

We have recently bought a new LED display like those you can find in the train stations for keeping a control of the current release number (important when you are developing super-secret features). The screen contains a 21×7 matrix, so there is not too much to do.

The good news is that the screen supports rendering of bmp images, so I figured that creating a program for generating this kind of images could be fun, and that’s what you can find in TinyBmp:

It contains three different projects in C#:

A class library that does the magic.

A desktop windows app.

A console app, for automating the image generation every time we ship a release.

This is how the tool looks like:

And this is how the output looks like, a 21×7 image in bitmap format (bmp).

I know that we can generate images with C# from text natively, but is not the greatest choice for low resolution problems because the numbers get disorted. In this aproach I’ve generated the number manually, having a 2×4 matrix for each number pixel per pixel.

This has some drawbacks, for example, 0 and 8 are represented by the same character, but I’m working on it.